TESTING EVENT-DRIVEN SOFTWARE–THE NEXT QA CHALLENGE?

A particular class of software that is fast becoming ubiquitous is event-driven software(EDS). All EDS share a common event-driven model–they take sequences of events
(eg, messages, mouse-clicks) as input, change their state, and (sometimes) output an
event sequence. Examples include web applications, graphical user interfaces (GUIs),
network protocols, device drivers, and embedded software. Quality assurance tasks
such as testing have become important for EDS since they are being used in critical
applications. Numerous researchers have shown that existing testing techniques do not
apply directly to EDS because of the new challenges that EDS offer. This column lists
some of these challenges and emphasizes on the need to develop new techniques (or
enhance existing ones) to test EDS.